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‘Most of World War I sepoys were peasant-warriors, soldiering was a source of livelihood … a war medal had a certain aura’

World War I saw the service of 1.3 million Indians. With the four-year commemoration of the centenary drawing to a close, author and academic Santanu Das spoke to Manimugdha S Sharma on hidden voices of the war:

Did MK Gandhi feel that the service of Indian troops in WWI wasn’t something Congress could leverage for greater political rights?

Soon after the outbreak of the war, in 1914, Gandhi volunteered to raise an Ambulance Corps in London. Upon his return to India, and particularly in 1918, he threw himself into the recruitment campaign. He toured villages in Gujarat and Bihar and gave a series of recruitment speeches.

For Gandhi, war service was not just a matter of political strategy for the post-war reward of India’s Dominion status. Gandhi’s experience in the imperial wars convinced him that it was the military – an institution trained to kill – that fostered some of the qualities he held most dear: self-discipline, self-sacrifice, courage, resilience, qualities essential to nation-building. Ahimsa, for Gandhi, was not absence but active renunciation of violence, and to renounce something, he argued, one should at first need to know it.

It makes certain philosophical sense but becomes seriously contentious as we move from philosophical ether to the muddy reality of the trenches. And the lives of so many young men are involved. It is as if even before the Indian soldiers had reached the battlefields of empire, they have become fodder in the experimental laboratory of Gandhi for the ‘greater cause’ – be it moral philosophy, empire or the nation.

Is it safe to say that the First World War contributed to the ideal of the satyagrahi being a warrior in Gandhian philosophy?

Violence and non-violence are very deeply conjoined in Gandhian philosophy. It is while during his recruitment campaign in Champaran and Kheda in 1918 that Gandhi noted: “The noblest warrior is he who stands fearless in the face of immense odds. He then feels not the ‘power to kill’ but that he has ‘the willingness to die’.” In another speech, he noted that instead of encouraging the young recruits to ‘go and kill Germans’, his refrain was ‘let us go and die for the sake of India and the empire”. This shearing off of the ‘killing’ from the ‘dying’ is however deeply dubious and insistently questioned by the war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

Tell us something about coercion as a tool of recruitment in India.

Soldiers are often turned either into loyalist imperial heroes or colonial cannon fodder or, more recently, into ruthless mercenaries. I argue that we need to find a more psychologically and culturally nuanced framework to understand their inner worlds and complex motives. Most of the sepoys were peasant-warriors, and soldiering was a source of livelihood. Money therefore was quite central, but fused and confused with it were social aspiration, family traditions, land grants, masculinity and perhaps a residual sense of ‘izzat’, whatever that may mean. A contemporary war poster promises ‘Good Food, Good Pay, Good Treatment, and a Healthy Life’; at the same time, a war medal had a certain aura and prestige, particularly in the martial village societies that went beyond the colour of money.

The whole recruitment campaign can be divided into three rough phases: from 1914-16, it was largely ‘voluntary’, even if propelled by economic incentives; in 1917, we see the beginning of the use of force, though in combination with more traditional incentives and methods; and from April to November 1918, it was largely coercion. Water supply for irrigation was cut off and, in a few extreme cases, women were kidnapped, if a village failed to recruit the set quota of soldiers.

You have researched accounts of many British soldiers of WWI. What do we deduce from it with reference to Anglo-Indian relations?

Nuance is essential. What countless examples show is that, in spite of the racist and often brutal imperial ideology with its power hierarchies – which made Indian soldiers go and fight in a war not their own – there were pockets of intimacy and warmth between individual British officers and sepoys. A classic case is the diary of ‘Roly’ Grimshaw, an officer with the 34th Poona Horse which saw action in France. He is often outraged at the treatment of the sepoys in the hands of his fellow English officers but he attributes it to individual ‘shortcoming’ rather than the fundamental racist structure on which the whole imperial ideology is based. And his admiration for the bravery of the soldiers, though warm and genuine, is fused and confused with a certain imperial fantasy of the ‘brave Indians’ fighting for Pax Britannica.

Did caste and class influence racism?

Class and caste are equally important factors. Thus, fellow officer MacGregor warmly mentions the martial races – Sikh, Muslim and Hindu sepoys – but the tone changes as he speaks about the ‘low caste swines – nai, mochi and kahar caste only … I feel like getting into an antiseptic bath after every parade with them’. So it’s not straightforward racism but gets mixed with class and caste prejudices.

You talk about the relationship between a British officer and an Indian sepoy through touch of a non-sexual kind. What do we know about touch and intimacy among the Indian sepoys in the camps and trenches?

In the trenches of the First World War, darkness, fear, mutilation and mortality profoundly changed the tactile norms between European men from civilian society: men cradled and kissed their dying friends, held each other as they danced, frolicked as they bathed together and at night, their bodies huddled together against the winter cold and falling shells. We have numerous examples from trench letters and poems and diaries; but when we turn to the Indian counterpart, we are met with deafening silence as most of the men did not know how to read or write. Moreover, touch and intimacy between men in the Indian context has a very different structure and history.

Yet, there are hints and whispers and fugitive fragments which give us some ideas.

We however have a few testimonial accounts of intense tactile encounters between Indians and British men, as when sepoys venture into no man’s land to rescue their officers, often under fire. There is a particularly moving one in a letter by Captain Dr Kalyan Mukherji when he notes how he gave some water to a dying young British lad, and the boy reached out to kiss his hand, and big tears rolled off his eyes.

You have written about the Tangkhul voices of the Manipur Labour Corps personnel. What do we learn about their understanding of the war?

Yes, this is the freshly unearthed memoir Apuk Apaga Raire Kare. France Khava 1917-1918 (The First Great War Worldwide. To France, 1917-1918) written by Karei Shaiza, a first-generation literate Tangkhul who accompanied the 66th Manipur Labour Corps Company as an assistant interpreter. And it is one of the very few documents we have of the experience of the labourers: the journey to France in a crammed ship, marked by sea-sickness, dizziness and the outbreak of cholera, of living amidst “vomit and excrement” and of dead bodies “wrapped and stitched in fabric” and thrown into the water. Or the stop in Taranto in 1917 where they are medically examined, which involved Italian doctors inserting “certain instruments into our anus” or their daily work from 1917 into 1918 in France, of sawing wood with machines from 7am till 5pm with a lunch break. And yet through all the drudgery and back-breaking labour shine forth rare moments of beauty and pleasure, as when the men play football or listen to the ‘sweetor whose gratifying voice of the cuckoo’ and are filled with longings for home.

Indian POWs are another segment whose voices are often not considered while discussing WWI memory. Why do you think this is so?

Indian commemorative accounts of WW1 are often based around the ‘heroic’ figure of the combatant; POWS don’t fit into that narrative and hence are often airbrushed out of FWW narratives. Yet, they are the only group for whom we have original sound-recordings. Several hundred original recordings of Indian sepoys have recently been unearthed amidst an extraordinary 2,677-strong collection, produced by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission. These recordings were part of an ethnological study in wartime Germany whereby a team of German academics – comprising ethnologists, linguists and philologist—studied the colonial POWs. The POWs were asked to stand in front of a phonograph machine and were asked to read a poem or tell a story; in the process, some of them managed to turn an ethnological experiment into a life-story or articulate their innermost wishes.

Do you think that even after a century, Indians still haven’t got the big picture of the war?

Both in the UK and in India today, the Indian sepoy is always invariably turned into a colonial hero. While the four years have successfully challenged the colour of memory, I think it is important now to go beyond just ‘remembering’ and ‘commemorating’ into inquiring what these practices mean, and whom and why do we ‘remember’? A more critical thinking space needs to be created which would include combatants as well as labourers and doctors, women and children, VC (Victoria Cross) winners and deserters and conscientious objectors; the war is not just combat but a conflict spawning plural narratives and it is important to pay attention to the diverse voices.